Toward A Bilingual Legal Term Glossary from Context Profiles

We propose an algorithm for the automatic acquisition of a bilingual lexicon in the legal domain. We make use of a parallel corpus of bilingual court judgments, aligned to the sentence level, and analyse the bilingual context profiles to extract corresponding legal terms in both languages. Our method is different from those in past studies as it does not require any prior knowledge source, and naturally extends to multi-word terms in either language. A pilot test was done with a sample of ten legal terms, each with ten or more occurrences in the data. Encouraging results of about 75% average accuracy were obtained. This figure does not only reflect the effectiveness of the method for bilingual lexicon acquisition, but also its potential for bilingual alignment at the word or expression level.